Democratic Tide in Russia Seen as Permanent

As a grocery store magnate who works 18-hour days and plows every ruble back into his business, Vasily Y. Pushkin might be expected to be quaking in his executive swivel chair over the Communist Party’s prospects for returning to power.

But the once-impoverished athletics coach, now running the kind of thriving private venture that has made Nizhny Novgorod a showcase of reform, is unruffled by forecasts of a strong Communist showing in Sunday’s parliamentary election.

“It’s gone too far and changed the lives of too many people to be reversed now,” the oddball optimist in Russia’s sea of self-pitying doomsayers concludes of the economic transition impoverishing some Russians while giving others, like himself, confidence in the country’s future.

“I’m 43 years old, and for the first time in my life I feel there is some sense to the system, that there can be goals, that we can work toward something, and if we work hard enough we will achieve it,” Pushkin enthuses, with the fire of the converted burning in his bespectacled eyes.

Even if the 450-seat state Duma is dominated by Communists and their anti-reform ilk, he says, the majority of Russians have broken free of the shackling mind-set that there is something wrong with personal initiative, competition and the entrepreneurial spirit.

“I used to be a devout Communist. No one believed more vehemently than I did in the righteousness of our ideals and the undeniability of communism’s victory,” Pushkin recalls mockingly. “So those who never shared my faith in that system and those who are too young to have been formed by it should be even more easily dissuaded.”

He counts among the enlightened most of the 140 employees of his growing enterprise, and he believes that the consumer society he is helping to build will eventually win over those still suffering the hardships of a stop-and-go transition.

Pushkin founded his first grocery store on the theory that those in the working-class district surrounding Nizhny Novgorod’s huge GAZ auto works would patronize a place where prices were consistently lower than at fancier stores stocked mostly with imports.

After securing a 15-year lease on a dilapidated state storefront, he bought up domestic products in bulk, halved the standard 30% grocers’ mark-up and swiftly drew a budget-conscious clientele. He now has five food shops and a hair salon where employees work on commission.

That the conspicuously wealthy directors of Russia’s biggest commercial enterprises will back continued reforms when they vote goes without saying. But that the nascent middle class of small-business entrepreneurs and their employees also value the changes gives Russians such as Pushkin the confidence to keep investing in the future.

Opinion polls predict a strong anti-democratic backlash throughout Russia during the Duma vote, as pensioners and state workers show their dissatisfaction with the uneven transition by choosing candidates promising a return to the more predictable ways of the past or a strong hand to crack down on rampant crime and corruption.

“The paradox of this election is that people are going to the polls with their heads turned backward,” says Sergei V. Belkovsky, an editor with the local Nizhegorodskiye Novosti newspaper. “They aren’t keeping their long-term interests in mind.”

But political leaders of all walks doubt that the next Duma will be able to turn a democratic tide that has benefited Russians, even if many deny it.

Perhaps nowhere in Russia are the results of reform more apparent than in this third-largest of its cities, known as Gorky during the Soviet era, when it was a closed compound of secret defense plants and political exiles. It was here that the late human rights champion Andrei D. Sakharov spent seven years in banishment for denouncing Communist oppression.

Most state-run businesses and all of Nizhny Novgorod’s housing were parceled out to private owners three years ago in a program developed by the region’s charismatic, can-do governor, Boris Y. Nemtsov, with the help of Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a renowned economist and presidential hopeful.

Nemtsov, 36, a consummate pragmatist, acknowledges that a Communist-led legislature is a strong possibility but brushes off suggestions that it could unravel reforms in his bustling province.

The greatest risk for Russia under a Communist-controlled Duma, he says, is the time that will be wasted if leftists try to placate their aging, nostalgic supporters with anti-reform laws that will end up getting quashed by presidential veto.

Russia’s constitution, written largely by President Boris N. Yeltsin, gives the chief executive broad power to undermine an uncooperative legislature.

“Sooner or later, Russians will come to their senses,” Nemtsov says of his countrymen’s electoral oscillations. “Sooner or later, the talented, gifted and resourceful people of this country will come to power. The wheel of history cannot be stopped. I’m not afraid of them [Communists] turning everything upside down in Russia.”

Nizhny Novgorod’s success has hardly been of universal benefit to the region’s 3.7 million residents. But even some who have missed out on the dividends of privatization say life holds more promise now than the “before” some want to go back to.

Yuri Kurganov, 31, an assembly line foreman at the sprawling auto works, still has no car of his own and lives in one tiny dormitory room with his wife and son, 6. He was a newcomer when the region’s housing was privatized, leaving him out of the distribution and at the mercy of a private market far beyond his price range.

Still, Kurganov, warm and dapper in good winter boots and a fleece-lined leather jacket, grudgingly acknowledges that the country’s new circumstances give him confidence for his young son’s future.

“There have been small improvements. Under communism, there were some things that a worker would never be eligible for,” he says, noting that a personal car was among the unattainable. “Now, you have to save for a long time, but if you really want something, you can work hard and get it.”

Those with less time to wait for the promised payoffs make up the bulk of Communist supporters, people like Anna S. Lukina, 65.

A recently retired forklift operator struggling along on a monthly pension worth little more than $20, Lukina must rely on handouts from her privately employed children to make ends meet. She tearfully shares memories of the Communist era--likely embellished--as a time of plenty when the state supplied everything from home heating to summer vacations.

“I had a happy childhood and a good life,” says the bundled pensioner as she went comparison-shopping for bread. “It didn’t matter that we had to live in barracks after the war. At least it was safe to be out on the streets at night. Now I’m afraid to answer my own door.”

Lukina and millions like her have responded to the Communist Party’s vows to turn back the clock to their remembered good old days.

Local party chief Vladimir P. Kiriyenko says the Communists’ first order of business, once in power, would be to stop privatization and seek a redistribution of the assets that many Russians believe were unfairly sold off.

But Yevgeny V. Zagryadsky, the head of the reformist Russia’s Choice party, shrugs off such claims as campaign bluster.

“There cannot be any pivotal changes in the political course of this country,” he insists. “The Communists are now part of the new way of doing things. Look at Gennady Khodyrev--he used to be the first secretary of the party [the Communist-era equal of governor] and now he’s the head of our chamber of commerce, and quite a reasonable guy.”

The head of a massive petroleum-financing venture, Nadir M. Khafizov, agrees.

“These are not the Communists of the past. Many of them are our stockholders and have no interest in upsetting the process,” Khafizov says. “I don’t think this, I know it. If this Duma starts to rock the boat for business, it will be dissolved.”